It’s a few days before the FW25 KidSuper show “From A Place I Had Never Been” at Paris Fashion Week, and we’ve gone down to designer and founder Colm Dillane’s show space in Paris to chat about his new collection (and tornadoes). When you’re working on a fashion show, things can get pretty last minute – there’s changes at the very last moment. “My show is in two days,” Colm says, “which really hurts to say out loud. We’re getting everything ready, we’re styling, fitting the models, doing last minute edits. We just had a girl fly from Italy with samples, so it couldn’t be more last minute. So, me doing an interview right now is probably pretty stupid.”
But Colm’s last minute decisions are his saving grace. “I have to be incredibly black and white – you cannot hesitate, because if you hesitate, everyone’s hesitating,” he says. “A lot of the good ideas come from things going wrong, and you have to pivot.”
For this season’s pivot: “Our factory that makes our bags was super delayed, and so I didn’t know if they were going to arrive on time. I couldn’t manufacture bags in time [for the show], so I was looking around, and I was like: ‘man, it’d be cool if we took this old phone I had in the studio, and drilled it into an old speaker’. And we used the handle, the phone handle, as the handle for the bag. They became these cool, sculptural pieces.” He adds: “I like those bags. I don’t know if anyone else will, but I like them.”
The New York-based streetwear brand and creative studio started out with teenage Colm screen-printing T-shirts and selling them to the BAPE line in Soho. “And now I have a BAPE collection. It’s pretty full circle for me, a lot of this stuff we’re doing now, I’ve been working on for years, and it’s pretty cool to see it at this level. Even Paris Fashion Week was never really a thing I thought was possible. And now we’re up against the biggest brands in the world, and you’ve seen me collaborate with some of them.” KidSuper has linked up with Louis Vuitton, Canada Goose, Puma, and now BAPE. “We have a whole BAPE collection that’s been previewed at this show – we’re using a lot of their iconic archive silhouettes and pieces and prints. That, for me, is pretty full circle.” Colm’s been a streetwear fan since his childhood: “A lot of designers don’t want to be called streetwear designers. They want to be called designers. I always wanted to be called a streetwear designer.”
He adds: “They drew little me [on a T-shirt]. I mean, that's pretty amazing. I used to kind of flip this art style. This is how I learned Illustrator on the computer, because I wanted to design in this kind of straight, simple vector file.”
You can bet on anything that KidSuper will go all out for its show, merging art with fashion and music – making it an immersive, multi-faceted experience. Last season, he put out a Cirque du Soleil puppet show for his FW24 collection “String Theory”. For FW25, the theme is tornadoes: “I’m working with an artist, Daniel Wurtzel, he does this really cool fabric installation artwork,” Colm says. “I want when you walk into the show, to feel like you’re in a different world. So, I was researching different kinds of art forms. I got obsessed with tornadoes, and was doing a lot of research about that, and found out this artist, Daniel, who was building indoor tornadoes. So, I cold-called him – his studio was in Brooklyn, and I just pulled up and was like: ‘Hey man, I got this crazy fashion show concept.’” That inspired a lot of the collection – adding a distressed, worked-in clothing element that Colm was excited to play with. “[Fashion shows] are so conceptual, they’re so thematic, that inspires a lot of the designs.”
Wait, hold on, let’s go back for a sec – how do you build a tornado? “To build one was hard,” Colm explains, “you had to truly engineer and figure out the way the wind moves. It’s all a kind of collaboration between fans and fog. There’s a lot of moments within the show that have a high percentage of not working. The only people that know it’s a tornado now, though, are you guys. So if the tornado thing doesn’t work, you scrap this and say ‘Colm was just looking for a mushy fog in the distance’,” he says laughing.
Late last year, Colm surprise-launched a record label, KidSuper Records, dropping a track with Giggs and Quavo. But it wasn’t totally unexpected – the designer has always embedded music in his shows, having worked with Rosalía, Joey Bada$$ and J Balvin, among many other artists. “We’ve always been a part of music. I’ve always had recording studios in the KidSuper shops, and led a lot of artists work out there for free, and did their album arts. And some of them have become quite successful. But this Paris Fashion Week has been this amazing platform to launch music, because all the artists are here. They all want to be a part of it.”
KidSuper brings a space where artists get to experiment. “I think that's the ethos of KidSuper as a place to kind of play. And I mean, you weren't here last night, but in this room, Giggs was here, and NLE Choppa was here, and Eladio, a huge reggaeton artist, was here. And then Ozuna FaceTimed me. And then Fuerza Regida, which is a huge Mexican band, was here. And all of them were, we were playing beats and music, and we had a recording studio set up downstairs, and they were all recording – it’s all pretty magical.” The show’s ending with this opera-trained singer Colm found on YouTube, Ekaterina Shelehova, and actually used her voice as a sample for some of the songs – “she has this crazy angelic voice”. It’s a group effort.
For the clothes, Dillane explored styles he hadn’t really done before this season: “These technical puffer jackets that feel more tactical than usual. I’m usually doing artwork and embroidery, and this one’s unbranded and doesn’t have prints.” The collection is insane. Colm has really outdone himself by curating all four seasons in one show: presenting patchwork techniques in jackets and pants, upcycling telephones into bags, head-to-toe fur ensembles, sleek briefcases, his own take on tailoring and an all-white ensemble pairing furs with a lightweight cotton skirt over trousers. And we need to get our hands on a “YAP” cap fr.
What’s happening after the show? “Well, we throw the best parties in Paris,” Colm says smiling. “[One year], I was at the after party roasting some French kids about them sucking at soccer. And they were like ‘Alright, come play us tomorrow.’ We pulled up and we beat them. So now, on the day after the parties, I try to play a soccer game. But I played against f*cking Trapstar one year. And he brought Alex Iwobi in the full, and a full f*cking U-19 Arsenal squad. I brought the f*cking seamstress. They won that one.”
Whether he’s playing against Trapstar or building tornadoes, Colm’s a chill guy, man. He knows what he likes, lets his inner child play around, and keeps on hustling and creating. His advice for anyone starting out their own brand? “The main secret to this game is consistently dropping stuff, you don’t have to drop the best collection. It’s just about showing up.”
Featured images by Culted©
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